Westlife tours under Martin MAC rig

Ever since the Irish quintet released their debut album Westlife, the band has experienced huge success with seven UK #1 hit singles and record sales already in the millions. That success is growing around the world.

Over 9,500 fans, some of who slept outside the Forum stadium in Copenhagen the night before, laughed, cried and fainted their way through one of the last European shows on Westlife’s 3-month tour.

Europe’s most popular boy band is touring beneath a large generic rig complemented with Martin MAC lights, including Martin’s latest moving head, the MAC 2000 profile spot. "One of the reasons why we went with the MAC 2000 was that we needed a hard edge fixture that would cut through thick generic washes," explains Lighting Director Barry Halpin. "The boys wanted a rock ‘n roll, very old school feel to the show which is why there are so many generics."

The tour is keeping to a rigorous schedule in support of their second album Coast to Coast having already played nearly 80 shows including 11 straight sold out nights in Dublin. Barry Halpin, whose past lighting credits include Enrique Iglesias, Lord of the Dance and WWF has put the MACs through their paces every day since the tour started on the 24th of January. Bandit Lites supplied all lighting for the tour.

LD Phay McMahon was responsible for design of the lighting scheme, incorporating a total of 26 MAC 2000s, a powerful 1200 watt profile spot loaded with effect features, into a unique set design in which several scenery elements move on tracks up and down the stage. The moving scenery is covered with projection cyc and provides excellent surface areas for image and texture projection.

On the road with the band however is Barry Halpin who has the honor of operating the lighting equipment during the tour. He comments, "The set is lit mostly by MAC 600s with some MAC 2000s for projection. The 600s don’t wash out the beam from the 2000s like you often get with a pair of fixtures. The 2000s and 600s work very well together. One of the great MAC 2000 effects is with the large zoom. You can do some really nice morphing of the gobos and morphing of the shapes because you can overlay two rotating gobos over each other, especially two dichroic rotating gobos. You can get some nice morphing in and out of focus between the two gobos and obviously zooming creates a nice effect, especially on a plain white wall."

"It’s quite a large moving set," continues Barry, "which is both good and bad. It’s very unforgiving but gives you the opportunity to light it any way you want." A row of 15 MAC 2000s hangs back of stage with six MAC 2000s situated front of stage, three on each side. This is complemented with a single MAC 2000 placed in the center of each of five square truss pods surrounded by par cans. Fourteen MAC 600 wash lights are situated on the front of stage truss, seven on each side of the stage along with 10 MAC 500 profile spots sitting directly on stage for projection uplighting, five on each side. Control is from a WholeHog II controller.

"One of the difficulties is that it’s a moving set," states Barry. "The whole set is 20 feet high, each set piece is 8 feet wide, and it rotates, so they can be anywhere from 6 feet wide to 10 feet wide. The whole set can rotate to cover the entire stage so it was important to have a fixture that would project a large enough image to cover the stage when it tracks, and that the intensity of the image wouldn’t differ too much depending on where the set was. That’s one of the reasons why we fitted the wide-angle lenses into the MAC 2000s. When the set tracks up and down you don’t want to have too much movement, you don’t want to have the moving heads following the set. It starts to get a bit messy. We were able to get wide enough beams from the projection distance we have to cover the set as it tracks up and down stage."

Additionally, on the UK leg of the tour five Martin TrackPod followspot systems, single-operator multiple-followspot controllers, were utilized to lay multiple beams on each member of the band. "On a show like this you don’t want to have a front wash, especially with a white set because it washes everything out completely so it was a bonus to be able to move the TrackPod onto the performers {and project light from above}," states Barry. "We always said that this would be the best tour and the worst tour for the TrackPod. We would really put it through its paces. For a start, we had to truss mount the TrackPod. We put our heads together on that one and figured out a way to do it but because of the nature of the set, it was hard to hit all the calibration points all the time. So we came up with a solution that suited us. Accuracy was increased by having the TrackPod mounted in the truss."

Because the TrackPod allows the same moving heads to act as followspots show after show, consistency of the light intensity is maintained. This was also an advantage for Barry. He explains, "When you use local followspots for each show you just never know if it’s going to be extremely bright or as bright as a candle."

Another advantage was the relatively simple process of teaching local operators how to use the TrackPod even though they had never used it before. "It literally took five minutes to teach them how to operate it," states Barry. "We just had to point out which guy they were to follow and that was it. A lot of people thought that a lot of calibration would have to take place - a couple of hours a day - that was the fear. To mount them took approximately ten minutes apiece, calibration took 3-4 minutes per TrackPod and then it was just a matter of checking the moving lights and recalibrating the moving lights so it took us maybe 30 minutes per day with the TrackPod."

After taking a well deserved short break, Westlife, Barry, the Martin equipment and the crew will continue the successful tour in the Middle East and Asia.